Joel Kuennen received his MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. He has published in America and the UK and was selected to participate in the Arts Writers Grant Workshop, 2012. He was a contributor and an editor of The Contemporary Visual Studies Reader which was published by Routledge in late 2012 in collaboration with James Elkins, Maureen Burns, Alicia Chester, and Kristi McGuire. His thesis at the School of the Art Institute Chicago explored conditions of subjectivity as constructed through spatial relationships. His current research interests are centered around digital selves, new media art, the intersection of politics and cultural production, and online art communities. He is the chief curator at ArtSlant and has curated the ArtSlant Prize exhibition since 2012.

He is the Chief Operations Officer and a Senior Editor at ArtSlant.com.

At SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018, more than 100 curators will feature artists and exhibitions that consider the theme: Stranger Comes to Town. It’s been said that all great literature boils down to one of two stories: a hero goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. “Who and what is this Stranger?” ask SPRING/BREAK curators and founders, Ambre Kelly and Andrew Gori. “Is...

This essay is published on the occasion of the ArtSlant Prize IX Winners Exhibition at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, March 6–12, 2018. Sabato Visconti is the ArtSlant Prize Second Prize winner.
Other ArtSlant Prize IX catalogue essays: David Rios Ferreira & Katya Grokhovsky
Although the law is perhaps the discourse that most literally governs...

As the European Union signals its distancing from a seven-decade transatlantic alliance, as the United States joins Nicaragua and Syria as the only other nations to demure from the Paris Climate Agreement, as a realignment of global hegemonies occurs before our eyes, there is no better time to reflect on the narrative of globalization. The 14th Factory, a warehouse-sized installation currently...

Anicka Yi, the recipient of the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize, opened Life is Cheap, consisting of three works, Lifestyle Wars, Immigrant Caucus, and Force Majeure, at the Guggenheim on April 21, 2017. The exhibition title is one part indictment, one part plea.
“Life is cheap” is usually said with a quiet lilt; eyes down, a slight shake of the head. The disgust...

This essay was first published in the ArtSlant Prize 2016 Catalogue, on the occasion of the ArtSlant Prize Shortlist exhibition at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, from February 28–March 6, 2017. Sterling Crispin is the ArtSlant Prize 2016 Third Prize winner. Other ArtSlant Prize 2016 catalogue essays: Brigitta Varadi & Tiffany Smith
What does the end, The...

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is perhaps best known for her project Stranger Visions, a dystopian romp into the world of cheap genetics technology and surveillance culture where she was able to create facial masks of New Yorkers from bits of gum and hair left by individuals on the streets.
Unfamiliar? Read our interview with her from last year to catch up.
Today, she released a comic,...

Farcical fascist, Donald Trump, will be winging his way through the next four years at the head of the United States government.
Fuck this. Stay angry. Be helpful. Be safe.
Artists have a duty to remain committed to the critique of society and while this list is not just art-related, our lives and our practices must confront and accept their political implications. Friends and...

DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) is often imagined as the key to identity, as the progenitor of who we are. It is nature within us and the scaffolding onto which we are nurtured into who we are. However, through epigenetics, viral transfer, and genetic drift, we are becoming more aware of the superposition of DNA and its ability to change, inherit, mute, and express with degrees of certainty, not...

We live at a time when an astounding amount of information is available to us at a shocking degree of immediacy. A netizen will regularly take deep-dives down wiki wormholes, eagerly grazing on masses of hyper-specific information related to a singular topic, all the while rhizomatically connected to and through a world of greater knowledge. No longer limited to a vocabulary of the...

In the coming days, Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to sign off on (by not vetoing) a Uniform Land Use Review Proposal that will officially add Socrates Sculpture Park to the city park system and literally “put it on the map.” On this plein air exhibition space’s 30th anniversary, a more fitting symbol of acceptance could hardly be more encouraging.
For a place that has...

As I was walking through the halls of Moynihan Station, weaving in and out of noir offices, I overheard a reporter repeatedly saying into a flip phone, as if he was relaying the latest from the frontlines, “It’s renegade, renegade!” I chuckled and kept meandering.
Maggie Dunlop at SPRING/BREAK
SPRING/BREAK is indeed a bit of a renegade. It has and...

Should art have a morality? This is a question that has plagued me the past few months, egged on by a resurgence in the use of “politically correct” or PC as a pejorative in American culture.
The term PC first came to political prominence in a speech given by George H.W. Bush during a commencement speech at the University of Michigan in 1991. In it, he was quick to align...

Back in October of 2015, I wrote a review of Shaun Leonardo’s performance, I Can’t Breathe, at The Eighth Floor (video below). Leonardo conducted "a public-participatory workshop and performance that takes the form of a self-defense class" in the pristine gallery space, combining poetry and movement to deliver a stark message about the reality many people of color face...

[Please be advised. This article contains imagery of 9/11 that may be upsetting to some readers.]
Another ISIL attack in the West, a threat on Washington D.C. and New York City, and the false sense of security that allows for the prosperity of the West to continue is shaken. The combination is just enough to entice xenophobic trolls to get the people’s blood boiling, again. These tragic...

When I first heard of Shaun Leonardo’s performance project, I Can't Breathe—a performance that taught spectators self-defense moves like how to break a chokehold if they are in a situation where they are being accosted—I was skeptical of its merit. Was it benefiting from a tragedy, or addressing real concerns? Would it incite citizens to resist arrest, or would it give people a...

The progressive narrative sells. The vision of an outsider is what is most appealing to both left and right. The fact that most Americans distrust their government—75 percent according to a 2014 Pew Poll—places us in a very precarious position. Rhetorical devices become exaggerated and people begin to grasp for emotional bonds rather that rational motives. This explains why people who...

On Wednesday evening, EXPO, in partnership with Kavi Gupta and Saint Heron sponsored a panel discussion at the artsy clubhouse, Soho House, Chicago. The panel, moderated by MCA curator Naomi Beckwith, consisted of Mickalene Thomas and Solange. (Full disclosure: ArtSlant’s Stephanie Cristello works for EXPO Chicago and helped organize the panel.) The names on the panel were enough of a draw...

Rubble and rock crushed under foot. Dead twigs, rebar, and shoots pocked the boulder field like tiny flag poles, stripped of their sigils. Chirps from the ceiling revealed a nestled group of parakeets dropping white ordnance on a hill of grey concrete. The smell of dirt and dissolution hung in the stale air. Down some stairs, into a darkened basement, the first thing that greets is the smell of a...

Hal Foster's new book, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, is set for release on Tuesday, September, 8. In it, Foster, Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, works through art's recent history to find what is and isn't working within the arts.
Considering recent paradigms of art ranging from "abject" to "post-critical," Foster...

I was recently at an art fair where one gallery—that shall remain nameless—presented the work of a young artist in a solo booth. The work, while distinct in some ways, was at the very least derivative of Anish Kapoor’s wall mounted discs. Enameled aluminum panels in sweeping gradients, they were perfectly suited to the market of the fair: take it home, put it on a wall. They...

The Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD), purveyors of the prestigious New York Studio Residency Program (NYSRP) have announced a new initiative for non-student artists called the Studio Practice Residency. The Studio Practice Residency, currently accepting applications, is lead by William Powhida, Artistic Co-Director of NYSRP, and is comprised of six, four-month...

Random International is an arts collective founded by Florian Ortkrass, Hannes Koch, and Stuart Wood currently based in London. They exploded onto the international art stage in 2012 with their extremely popular Rain Room, a work that was supremely Instagrammable, but also illucidated the magical realism that the marriage of art and technology can produce. After extremely successful...

What does the conscience of a profession look like? Physicians and futurists have ethics councils. This or that Board or Agency marks the boundaries of most fields and enterprises to better direct cooperative human energy in mutually agreed upon trajectories. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, but overall, it’s a system that has worked well for the past century. Arts writers don’t...

First, apologies for the puns to come. It’s difficult to talk about sexuality and eroticism without making a bad pun or two. Sexuality has seemingly always been a site of discomfort in our culture: through it, we are laid naked and bare, both literally and via the fetishes that express the darkest sublimations of gendered relations. The advent of a communication tool and platform for...

If you happen upon a couple in 1920s garb having a heated discussion about love on a park bench in Central Park, don’t worry, you didn’t fall asleep watching Netflix. If you spot a pastel solar-powered ice cream truck handing out soft-serves that tastes like sunshine, you’re not hallucinating. If you happen upon an Icelandic sailboat revolving around an island on the Harlem Meer...

You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood. In fact, I guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream...

The last two months have seen two great celebrity-become-artist scandals. Björk’s retrospective and Kanye’s doctorate. Two years prior, Abramovic's The Artist is Present paired with a performance by Jay-Z stoked the same flame that threatens to consume our conceptions of aesthetics and Artist—with a capital A. Because that exists, still.
Art, it seems, may need a new...

As an SAIC alum, my newsfeed has been abuzz the past week with artists and writers decrying the honorary doctorate Kanye West told France’s Clique TV that he would be receiving this coming May. Last night, it was made official with a statement released by SAIC. Other honorees include legendary Chicago gallerist, Rhona Hoffman, artist/donor Janet Neiman, and German painter Albert Oehlen who...

Hopping around the fairs you start to notice some trends in material and content. We’ve noticed a healthy use of floral foam at Independent and Armory, rock-climbing grips as wall plinths, new-media on canvas, and a whole bunch of animated icons making their way into the pictorial plane. There is a lot of playfulness this year… but it’s all rather childish.
Per Fhager at...

As I was walking around the Armory Show preview on a slushy Wednesday afternoon, I overheard Neil Patrick Harris say, like a self-assuring mantra, “This is not going to make me anxious” as he walked into the fair. I empathized, ridden already with the anxiety of two hours' worth of art-gazing and glad-handing behind me.
Fairs are bound in anxiety for a lot of reasons. They are sheer...

“Kehinde Wiley is everywhere right now,” said Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum, as the small press tour began. This was not an exaggeration by any means; Wiley garnered recent attention when his paintings appeared as backdrops in Fox's Empire, a highly stylized melodrama from Lee Daniels and Danny Strong that collages black...

There is no better point in time to enact change than during a cultural rupture. Popular culture—the expressions that bind a collective group—is a smooth stream of images and ideologies that flows at an overwhelming and indomitable rate. This is part of the mandate of contemporary culture: to express with as many images and words as experienced time will allow.
Smack Mellon, a New...

Material can be transcendent.
Postmodernism is failing.
History is a spiral.
These three assumptions underlie Oren Pinhassi’s work. Beginning with the familiar—towels, a backpack, a dwelling—objects are transformed through the addition of another common material, plaster. Through this addition, he transubstantiates the everyday into thematic sculptural and...

A word forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way.
—Mikhail Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel, 1941
Adam Douglas Thompson’s drawings are words. His installed formations are sentences. His words, however, are not defined. His sentences are not linear. They are dialogic imaginations, each image acts a concept which through their relational grouping gains meaning. The...

Corporatism pervades the art world: BMWs are wrapped in Jeff Koons vinyl, museum exhibitions and art fairs are sponsored by global financial institutions, one mega luxury conglomerate even has an entire museum. It's a simple fact now: money and art go hand-in-hand. Usually, the issue taken up is the cooption of art for financial/political purposes and the impure state in which this leaves art...

MoMA PS1 threw their annual Halloween Ball last Friday - the theme this year: Hallowqueens! The galleries remained open during the costume ball making for some interesting juxtapositions.
First, four dumpsters sat in the courtyard marked with "THROW YOUR ART AWAY", a project from Bob and Roberta Smith (actually one person) that asks gallery goers to bring in their old art and treat it as the...

Office Planter by Lizzie Fitch, $200 on disown
DIS, the collective behind a variety of interruptive enterprises such as dismagazine, disown, and disimages has been appointed the curatorial panel of the 9th Berlin Biennale. While the 8th Biennale was curated by Juan A. Gaitán and focused on themes of post-colonialism, the selection of DIS for the next iteration marks...

Chicago, Aug. 2014: Zachary Cahill is an interdisciplinary artist working in Chicago. He is a lecturer at the University of Chicago Department of Visual Arts and Coordinator of the Open Practice Committee. His work was recently included in the 8th Berlin Biennale, curated by Juan A. Gaitán; USSA 2012 Wellness Center: Snow, curated by Abigail Winograd at the Museum of Contemporary Art...

Liliya Lifanova received her MFA from SAIC in 2010. Following that, she found herself asking a familiar question to many young artists: what next? Nurtured by the inclusive, critical and supportive, art-centered environment of graduate school, her first post-graduation initiative was a take on the practice of residencies. Called Artist in YOUR Residence, the purpose of the project was to...

ArtSlant editors Natalie Hegert, Joel Kuennen, and Charlie Schultz met up at Agra, an Indian restaurant on Lexington Avenue, to discuss the opening of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, its surprises, best in show, and disappointments. They touch on trends and themes of scale, archives, lists, dongs, and objectness—parsing the line between artwork and artifact.
Charlie Schultz: I guess I’ll...

In writing this review, Dear Reader, it has been difficult to retain a narrative thread. Each work at ONLY REAL, Public Works latest exhibition, seems to reference another work in the exhibition while simultaneously opening up further implications and complications in a seemingly endless cascade of elusive meaning, contributing to a feeling that each explication is about to collapse in on itself....

Call him Omar. A bundle of kind energy dedicated to his curatorial craft, Omar Lopez-Chahoud guided UNTITLED. through its first iteration last year during Miami Art Week to a very successful conclusion. Much more than a white whale beached on the sands off Ocean Drive, the great white tent designed by Keenen/Riley Architects (K/R Architects), and redesigned this year by the same, promises to be...

Robin Kang - First Place, ArtSlant Prize 2013
Robin Kang interrogates machinery. From her roots as a photographer (BFA) and through her MFA in printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, it’s always been about how the machine affects the artwork produced and what exactly can be done within that process of translation: idea to object. Her latest projects involve two very...

In 1968, the idea of Canadian Content was set down as law in the Broadcasting Act of Canada. It ensures that “each broadcasting undertaking shall make maximum use, and in no case less than predominant use, of Canadian creative and other resources in the creation and presentation of programming.” As Ryan Edwardson aptly points out in his book Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for...

On August 21st, the New York Times published an article entitled, “For Art Dealers, a New Life on the Circuit.” In it, a great lament for the loss of the fat times when dealers had but to sit in their galleries and wait for buyers to walk through the door. Now, they must trot around the globe, hawking their wares like common international businessmen and businesswomen. Reeling back...

Chicago has doubled-down in September. The month of openings is now a full-on arts bacchanal. The nascent EXPO has proven itself a powerful nexus, pulling together the disparate art worlds of Chicago into a dense cloud of top-notch openings, performances, events and fairs – many scheduling their openings around the weekend of the 20th to coincide with an amassing of collectors. Yet many...

Jennifer and James Wallace, co-founders of nAscent Art New York, have made it their mission to champion emerging artists. Not only that, but they have made it their business. In 2007, nAscent Art began as a small auction house to represent emerging artists. Finding it difficult to drum-up buyers let alone a buyer for emerging artists’ works, they decided to employ a different tact in...

San Francisco, Jul. 2013: Laura Hyunjhee Kim won ArtSlant’s first Award in New Media earlier this year and lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Kim is currently exhibiting at SoMArts, San Francisco and recently exhibited with popular French new-media gallery, SPAMM (Super Art Modern Museum). Blurring lines between performance and new media practices, Kim presents a mirrored...

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods: this is a kind way to put it. In reality, Chicago suffers from deep segregation – limiting the potential of a majority of its citizens. Avenues such as Western are lines that mark boundaries between races and income brackets. As one travels west on Division, from Wicker Park, median household income drops by $30,000 upon crossing Western Avenue. With this...

On Friday, May 17th at ArtPadSF, tumblr is hosting the TUMBLR ARTS SUMMIT. Moderated by Annie Werner, the panel is meant to discuss tumblr as a platform for the arts. Kara Q. Smith of ArtSlant SF, Open Space and Art Practical; Aditya Julka, Co-founder of Paddle8; Jennifer Yin of the Asian Art Museum; Liz Glass of CCA Wattis Institute; Ken Harman of Spoke Art; artist Eric Dyer and I will be...

How we use images and information is changing, therefore, copyright is changing. The image has migrated away from an object of economic value towards one of heightened cultural capital. Social media has developed in such a way that sharing information has become synonymous with sharing images. Infinite copies of images act as citations to shared opinions and data points. Yet the image is not...

Michael Zelehoski won the ArtSlant Prize in 2009, the first year the competition ran. Since, his career has only been gaining steam, having two solo shows a year and making the rounds of the fair circuit. I sat down with him in his home/studio in Beacon, NY as he readied his installation, WALL ART for Ethan Cohen Fine Arts’ booth at Volta.
Joel Kuennen: Where were you at in your career when you...

Chicago, Dec. 2012: Danh Vo, a Danish, Vietnamese-born artist living in Berlin, won the Guggenheim Foundation’s Hugo Boss Prize this year. His work combines a nuanced approach to relations existent within the conventions of the art world as well as the relationships that are developed with objects, both personal and foreign, in the negotiation of identity. In short, Vo’s ability to imbue...

Veronica Bruce - 1st Place, ArtSlant Prize 2012
I met Ms. Bruce in a studio that looks more like a construction site than an artist’s studio, in one of Chicago’s many industrial lofts. Her sculptures rose vertically from the wooden floor, dotting the space as piles of material rounded the interior. Bruce’s process is founded in her training as a painter but has since expanded off the wall and...

Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) is the mother of American art fairs (you know this by now). Celebrating a decade this year, ABMB has, from the beginning, been a city-wide event. Every year, a new satellite fair/festival/happening/event is added to the already art-packed weekend and yet it seems Miami has an art tolerance on par with your average Baseler’s liver. ABMB became the destination par...

Susanne Ghez, Executive Director of the Renaissance Society, will step down in January after a prestigious career shepherding this Chicago institution known for its impeccable programming in contemporary art. Ms. Ghez took the helm of the Ren, as it’s affectionately called, in 1974 with a meager budget of $25,000 and built one of the country’s premier, non-collecting institutions with a current...

Elizabeth Atterbury, a recent graduate of MassArt, began with a still life picture of a corner of her friend’s apartment in Portland. The Study began a research-like production that ultimately recalls Man Ray’s experiments with the picture plane (rather than process) through his invention of the rayogram, and in the end draws attention back to the work of photography as a representative...

Columbus, in a memorialized bold swish of the hips, stands confidently atop a dark, wooden coffee table, glaring off into the corner of a poshly decorated living room. The thirteen-foot tall statue finds an odd home as the axis of this imagined living space. Tatzu Nishi’s Discovering Columbus is this Japanese-born, Berlin-residing artist’s latest work. He has become well-known for his...

A familiar eye in luminescent, freshly hewn copper stares up from a wooden cradle against a backdrop of anthropomorphic lions ripped from the palace walls of Sargon II, an Assyrian king who ruled in the 7th century BCE. This is probably the most striking installment of Danh Vo’s We the People in Chicago—an indefinite project brought to Chicago as a collaboration between the Art Institute of...

What makes EXPO CHICAGO different from the rest? Nicole Berry, Deputy Director of EXPO CHICAGO perhaps said it best towards the end of a chat we had on a sunny day outside a small café near the offices of EXPO in River North. “Hamza Walker said it in an article, ‘Chicago is having a moment,’ which is totally true… Chicago deserves an art fair, a serious art fair of the highest quality and we’re...

It’s that time of month, Chicago. To say that every gallery in town is opening their doors this Friday is hardly an exaggeration. In light of this, I’d like to take a moment to do a quick preview of what we’re looking forward to this weekend and hopefully give some good cues as to where to head to get your fill of Trader Joe’s wine and chilled PBR’s, and perhaps, just perhaps, to catch a glimpse...

Green paint and gold gilt flake from ornamented porticos that overlook the stained floor and darkened stage of Thalia Hall – a century-old Czech Theater in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Largely abandoned for the past two decades, this past weekend it was the site of an IRL, "in real life," experiment. DINCA Vision Quest 2012, according to the program, sought to “translate the dinca.org blog...

The Hamptons buzz and hum in July. City-folk braving the three hour drive for a weekend respite from an overly ripe Big Apple head determinedly for surf and society. Part of the escapist appeal of the Hamptons lies in the art fairs; ArtHamptons (7/13-15), artMRKT Hamptons (7/19-22), and Art Southampton (7/26-30).
These are small fairs; many galleries represented are appointment-only specialty...

ArtSlant's Joel Kuennen decided to ask a few recent graduates from some of the top MFA programs in the US about their practice, what’s influencing them right now, and what the role of art is today. Here's what Jorge Mujica, from Yale University's MFA Painting Program, Amber Heaton from RISD's (Rhode Island School of Design) MFA Printmaking Program, and Dao Nguyen from SAIC's (School of the Art...

On May 22, the Roy Lichtenstein Retrospective, an exhibit that’s been five years in the making, will open its doors. Expertly curated by Sheen Wagstaff and James Rondeau, this exhibit presents, a-chronically, thematic slices from Lichtenstein’s vast body of work; including Art History, Black and White, Mirrors, and War and Romance. It is the largest retrospective on the artist to date, with 160...

As I walked up the stairs into the darkened gallery of Alderman Exhibitions’ new loft space in an old warehouse on Randolph Street, I heard a long hissss and looked up to see a fuse burning in a shaky frame. I had walked in on the screening of Long Fuse, 2012, by Robert Chase Heishman and Brendan Meara.
I perched on the top step and watched the fuse burn over snow, ice, grass, wood, concrete...

Bodies pull, collide and fall into unison. People hold hands watching as she takes her time, dancing for them all. A couple stares at each other, their eyes inches away, as an operatic crescendo climbs from the speakers above the stage. For some reason modern dance fell into the cliché for many people. But every time I see it, I watch with amazement as bodies contort to rhythms that seem...

I’m always filled with something bordering on dread when writing a best of list. Dread at the prospect of rereading old reviews, dread at trying to recall what all I saw and mostly the dread at attempting to reflexively judge work that has long disappeared from galleries and, usually, my head. But this year…this year was a good year.
GLI.TC/H. Image via flickr user Ignotus the...

If you looked up at the Aon building, the tallest skyscraper to the north of Millennium Park, between the 51st and 61st floors at any point from 6 PM and 2 AM last Friday, you could see a faint image of the Empire State Building perched there, flickering like a votive candle. This was Andy Warhol’s eight-hour film, Empire. Curated by Matthew Witkovsky, the Chair of the Department of Photography...

This is probably the third Steven Frost show I’ve been to this year. "Exploding Faces, [Confining Spaces]" and "Splay" presented two very different forms of work—collages and performance, respectively. As his past work suggests, Frost’s background lies in the material, fabrics specifically. He brings the attention for detail necessary in fabric work to a very diverse and active sculpture practice...

Chicago, Nov. 2011 - I sat down this past month for a drink with France Cadet, French artist who has been blurring the lines of the natural and the robotic for the past decade or so. Ms. Cadet was just this year brought on by the Art and Technology faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Previously, she had been volume and robotics professor at Ecole Supérieure...

A year ago, Chicago hosted the first GLI.TC/H conference. The second year was a four-day volley (Nov. 3-6); a full weekend of exhibitions, workshops, real-time performances and a symposium that are being followed by two days of events in Amsterdam (Nov. 12-13) and a Saturday in Birmingham, UK (Nov. 19). While this article focuses mainly on “GLI.TC/H 20111” in Chicago, an upcoming article for...

When I came across the promotional images for this exhibition by young artist Sterling Lawrence, I must confess I wasn’t too enthused. Large format gradients, abstracted sculptural gestures, clean lines that lead to conceptual destinations within the hyperbaric chamber of the gallery. It was gallery art. Art made for a gallery. I just wasn’t feeling it… until I was in the gallery...

“Yeah USSA! Go Bears, Go!” Said artist, Zachary Cahill during his Artist’s Talk at threewalls last Thursday, the night that also coincidentally coincided with the beginning of Occupy Chicago. Both this exhibition and the gathering inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement find their origins as orphans.
Ending its month-long run at threewalls this weekend, Zachary Cahill’s "USSA 2012: The...

When walking into Discount Mega Mall, you have the feeling that you are entering an indoor flea market. And in fact you are. $20 jeans, tattoo and piercing booths, bling and engagement rings, Catholic bric-a-brac, car stereos with candy colored subwoofer booths are scattered amongst vacant 10’x10’ lots in long rows that circle in on each other. The shop owners all seem to lounge in their small...

This past Friday saw the opening of “Splay,” curated by Marissa Perel, a performance artist and curator. Representing artists from around the world and comprised of installations and two performances (by Steven Frost and Syniva Whitney) “Splay” gestures towards contemporary standards of eroticism and the state of the erotic as a reflexive component in the construction of self. Perel hopes to...

Antena (the Spanish spelling of “antenna”) is a project space run by Miguel Cortez of the now-defunct Polvo collective and magazine. Located in Pilsen, Antena has a history of presenting new and interesting work that has given it a reputation of excellent curation representative of young artists and emerging work at the intersection of genres most important to the contemporary moment. Mr. Cortez...

“Animality” is one of the rare occasions where academia meets the road, so to speak, as the theoretical map is put to use. In the spring of 2011, Zach Cahill, a lecturer with the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago and coordinator of the Open Practice Committee, taught a course entitled “Animality” as a survey of the issues surrounding the complicated and often problematic...

Last Saturday night, Kunsthalle New, a small storefront gallery in typical Pilsen fashion, opened their new show, “A Small Forest.” According to the exhibition description, “‘A Small Forest’ explores delicate landscapes developed and appropriated by [the] artist that have been found and manipulated with the space of the screen.” Meaning: the artists in this show are expressing aesthetics that are...

In a redeveloped loft, far out on Lake Street, past the Garfield Conservatory and amidst islands of empty lots and padlocked warehouses, a small group of artists run ADDS DONNA. This six-person collective shares studio spaces, runs reading groups and operates a gallery. Coming to an end July 10th, “HIDE” is a two-person show from Brooklyn-based artists Leeza Meksin and Yevgeniya Baras.
Leeza...

Jasmine Justice sounds like a name given to the righteous fall of autocracies in the Middle East. However, Jasmine Justice is the real, and awesome, name of an American-born abstract expressionist painter currently living in Istanbul, Turkey. Ms. Justice’s style, color palette and play with titles affix her to contemporary painting in the United States, yet the visual vivacity, visceral vibrancy...

“Good afternoon, there is art in both galleries and the men’s section is on the right,” said Alma Wieser, the “mother” of Heaven, with a smile as I came in. Run by Alma Wieser and Joe Jeffers, Heaven Gallery has been a staple of Milwaukee Avenue for over a decade now. Founded in 1997 in the Flat Iron Building, it found its way to its current location in 2000. Heaven is known for having an open...

This past weekend, “Symptoms Variable” opened at Roxaboxen Exhibitions, an apartment gallery in Pilsen. The culminating show for the Master of Art in Visual and Critical Studies program at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), “Symptoms Variable” serves as a clear window into the enigmatic discipline of Visual Studies, a discipline I, by way of disclosure, also hold a degree in from the...

On Tuesday, May 3, 2011, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Hubbard Street Dance Studio teamed up for their last performance in a week-long series of collaborations between the firmly established Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) and the young and inventive Hubbard Street.
The program seemed like it was going to be a rather normal night. Scheduled were two sets by Vivaldi, a lovely and...

This year at Art Chicago, a couple of London galleries showed up with some amazing, non-Damien Hirst work.
Chris Wood. Volute.
Leading the way was the Woolff Gallery, run by an energetic father-and-son duo. Woolff represents stunning master craft artists Marcus Egli, Chris Wood and Petr Weigl as well as the playful Cube Works, Russell West, Clay Sinclair and Joanne Tinker.
Seen...

Tucked behind a duplex and overlooking a cornered courtyard is the West Town apartment gallery, Noble & Superior Projects. This month, they are presenting a show entitled "Post-Smithson," a parodic and periodic study by artists Isabelle Gougenheim, Emily Irvine, and Emilie Crewe.
Before the "post," there was Smithson. Robert Smithson is best known for his earthworks: monumental...

A slight woman in a white bridal dress and a man in a tux hand out perfume test strips from a card table in front of the door. I’m not sure why. There’s a crowd gathered around and the man is eagerly pushing the strips in people’s faces with an enormous smile. Little white strips litter the ground spreading out from the table, dispersed like a star burst.
Sexier is not your average titillating...

On 35th Street, west of the White Sox stadium and east of Bridgeport’s industrial wasteland, lies a four-story, 80,000 sq. ft. brick building housing studios, five gallery spaces, a café and a museum shop. Founded in 2003 by the Zhou Brothers, a pair of eccentric and self-proclaimed prodigious artists that settled in Chicago two decades ago, Zhou B Art Center has consistently interesting openings...

Nick Briz (pronounced breeze) makes art according to the belief that copyright law as it currently exists is a violation of vital human expression. His artistic practice finds itself at the nexus of art and technology; within this intersection the artist produces interrogations and critical expositions of the digital everyday.
Enemy, an apartment gallery devoted to aural delights (i.e.: sound...

In the realm of the contemporary art gallery, it’s common to see uncommon work. This paradigm poses many problems for the critic not to mention the artist, problems that have been brewing for almost a century now. The modern focus on “the new” has churned out mountains of dispensable artifacts along with masterpieces, but fortunately “Exploding Faces (Confining Spaces)” at Robert Bills...

On November 30th, 2010, the art world recoiled as the news spread that the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), under the orders of Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough, had succumbed to pressure from the Catholic League and Republican members of the House of Representatives to remove an artwork by David Wojnarowicz from the NPG’s exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in...

Candy. Lots and lots of brightly packaged eye candy in infinite planes, forcing comparisons across colored contrasts. McElheny is one of those artists who produces work that can be enjoyed without a background in art, but it’s fun to throw words at it too. Complex-simplicity seems to be his operating system. Light-refracting glass objects are placed in monotone cabinets like so many deco pill...

Pulling from the Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MCA) own collection, curator Tricia Van Eck, with the help of Dominic Molon (a former curator at the MCA, now Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis), presents this season’s bread-and-butter exhibition. Running until May, “Without You I’m Nothing” addresses an issue that has defined art from the ‘60s onward: the viewer. What is the...

On the east side of the Fulton Market area, a new gallery has popped up this year. Down some stairs, round a couple of corners, and through several halls, one finds Robert Bills Contemporary. Over the year, Robert Bills Contemporary has exhibited talented artists like Nathan Vernau, Lisa Nonken and Woohyun Shim. This show is no exception. Work spills out into the hall from...

In a dark and smoky basement, a traveling-musician-clown character who has been looping Mongolian throat singing suddenly shouts from the stage “Thanks to Edmar for putting this on!” A phone rings and a 30-something man with longish brown hair and a Western-style shirt flashes across the front of the stage, the light of a phone pressed to his ear illuminating the side of...

As of November 29th, 2010, it has had 941,218 views and 15,964 comments and it’s an art video on YouTube.
The other week, I was speaking to a friend over a drink. A graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he mentioned that a fellow student’s performance documentation had gone viral on YouTube. Intrigued...

Snuggled into the corner of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MCA) second floor is a fascinating exhibition, “Informal Cities” that focuses on methods of organizing information. In the modern West, the urban has been a critical site of theoretical and experimental thought throughout the last century, coming to a head with the iconic publication of La révolution...

Spitting and splattering spurts of vomit, ejaculate and glitter. Steve Reinke, a Canadian-born artist who now works and lives in Chicago, is the subject of a wonderful exhibition at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) Gallery 400. Centered on his collaborative work completed over the past few years, as well as an hour-long compilation of his new work, this...

Ever been to an eccentric billionaire art-lover’s island experiment? I hadn’t either and surprisingly, it was pretty cool.
This past month, I found myself on a large ferry with about ten other people leaving the port of Okayama and heading to an island in the Inland Sea of Japan called Shodoshima, a member of the Setouchi Islands. It was an overcast day, like most other days that week. Rain came...

Gallery season is now officially in full swing as witnessed by the glut of art kids and young professionals that swarmed the West Loop Gallery district this past weekend. While I find these conditions annoying to say the least, it does at least give one confidence in a functioning art market.
My assigned objective for the night was to scope out the Chris Johanson...

This past weekend Chicago hosted Sonar, an electronica festival that originated in Barcelona in 1994. Barcelona hosts the festival annually, but since 2002 the festival has manifested in various global cities: London, New York, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Seoul, Frankfurt, Tokyo, etc. Most recently, it appeared in Chicago with a smattering of...

In a small back-alley garage, under the shadow of the Kennedy Expressway, a gallery exists, sometimes. Sometimes it’s the painting studio of Anna Kunz, Chicago artist and instructor at Colombia College. "Indestructible Youth," the fourth show put on by Ms. Kunz, was a compact, passionate and talent-filled display. Housing young artists from New York and...

On the corner of North Avenue and Artesian Avenue, an eroding mural is painted onto the side of a three-story brick building. It depicts three crucifixions. On the left, Lolita Lebrón, “crucificada en vida,” (“crucified in life”) is the epitaph above her head. On the right, Rafael Cancel Miranda, with the same epitaph lying above his...

This past Wednesday, Zachary Kaplan curated a look at popular reactions to 9/11 at the fundamental Golden Age space in West Loop in a five-day exhibition run that ended on Sunday. Golden Age is mainly an artist-book store with unique and small edition prints from local artists. I arrived early to a small room and the curator and I began to chat about the significance of such a, well,...

Pop-crackle­-sparkle. Fireworks take flight over the city, from the North to the South – sound and vision wed in the momentary act of an aesthetic explosion. It’s the Fourth of July and the city is rumbling around me as I sit and write this article.
Down at the Art Institute of Chicago, however, things are quieter at their Sound & Vision exhibition in the...

Walking down California Avenue, I see a red carpet stretched out like a lapping tongue from Mvsevm’s front door. A mylar flag, ,Vidi,, [sic] by Brookhart Jonquil, is suspended from the second story window of the gallery and flaps in the wind with the hard crinkle of metalized nylon. Up the cattywampus stairs to the second floor and through the door, the...

Roger Hiorns is a London-based artist who has been making waves and iridescent crystals across the pond for the last few years, most recently being shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2009 for his installation entitled SEIZURE. From submerging thistles, engines or entire rooms in a solution of copper sulfate, to pulverizing jet engines into fine dust,...